The "Media" We Wish We Had

In recent weeks I haven't found anything worth posting... that is, until I saw this video yesterday.

Though the clip is from Aaron Sorkin's fictional "News Room", everything spoken by the supposed fictional anchor is true - the stories, the politicians in their own words, the facts. Watch it; if you believe it speaks to the heart of the fate of this country, share it - put it on your FaceBook, your blog, whatever. It has over 1 million views already and it needs to be viewed by millions more.

How ironic that such clarity of truth should be spoken so eloquently from a "fiction" news media.

AI, Sci-Fi and Silicon

Fairly recently my buddy and I got into a discussion regarding the future of computing; specifically, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Having grown up with television shows such as (classic) “Star Trek”, I have been amazed at how reality has actually surpassed our fictional imagination regarding computer capabilities. The cell phones we routinely carry with us today far surpass the computational power of the Space Shuttle. But are we on a pathway to someday creating a real “Lt. Cmdr. Data”? Well…

The silicon micro chip and modern science fiction has suggested, perhaps somewhat mythically, that future AI might manifest itself as some type of Silicon Life Form. Unfortunately, as chemists point out, silicon as a basis for a living organism has some major drawbacks compared to carbon. Though silicon has the ability to bond with other atoms, such molecules are relatively unstable. As a result the largest silicon compound ever observed was limited to only six silicon atoms. Carbon, on the other hand, is able to produce long chains of hundreds of thousands of atoms. Large complex chains of carbon atoms have the ability to form “left-handed” versions, which build amino acids, and proteins, and “right-handed” versions which form sugars. Carbon dioxide is a gas which dissolves easily in water, whereas Silicon dioxide is a solid.

Ok, so perhaps then we could conclude that a silicon life form might exist less as a carbon-based “living” organism and instead more like a super sophisticated robot. After all computing technology is increasing inversely to size and energy requirements. Well, not so much – silicon as a substrate is soon to reach its limits of it’s capability as a substrate for micro-processing. Moore’s Law has postulated that we could expect the number of transistors on a substrate to double every couple of years. That has happened to the point where now close to 200 million transistors can be placed on a single microchip resulting in smaller processors requiring less energy. But as size drops down to the 32 to 22 nanometer range, as it will within the next two decades, quantum effects and manufacturing technology limitations hit their bottom limit. For the trend of Moore’s law to continue, silicon must be abandoned.

It is true that silicon based computing has taken us very far. Earlier this year IBM’s “Watson”, a remarkable computer that demonstrated the ability to learn and reason, had its debut competing against two of the smartest human contestants ever to appear on the TV game show “Jeopardy”. But as sophisticated as was Watson, it was “tasked” with sole purpose of competing on a game show. Without being given a question to ponder, Watson is essentially inert – not capable of creativity, imagination or any of the other emotionally driven neural processes that make the human brain such a powerful generator of abstract ‘thought’. A computer with similar capabilities of the human brain would require a hydro dam amount of electrical energy consumption to even remotely emulate.

What works better than silicon, then? It turns out – Carbon; more specifically the carbon molecules that form the DNA molecule. DNA may be the future of computing technology that takes us beyond the limits of Moore’s Law. DNA is abundant and cheap, self replicating, consumes low amounts of energy; remarkable amounts of data can be processed in amazingly small amounts of physical space.

Though they are still in their infancy, DNA computers have been around since 1994 and have been used to solve some complex mathematical problems. These natural supercomputers already exist in our bodies; research into DNA computing promises to help us unravel both the complexity of the human brain as well as usher us into the newest realm of computer technology. With the epitaph of silicon looming on the horizon, science and industry is already working to build a more compact, efficient and accurate computer which replaces the need for electrical switching with chemical bonding.

But don’t sell your Intel stock just yet.

 ~~~

References and further reading:

Could Life be based on Silicon rather than Carbon?, NASA Astrobiology Institute

http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/astrobio/feat_questions/silicon_life.cfm

Where Is My Silicon-Based Life? Ask a Biogeek

http://io9.com/5020921/where-is-my-silicon+based-life

Limitation Of Silicon Based Computation And Future Prospects, Shazia Hassan, Department of Computer science, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Punjab, Pakistan

http://www.iub.edu.pk/Documents/Mamoona../Limitation_of_Silicon_Based_Computation_and_Future_Prospects.pdf

Silicon shrinking will end about 2020, what will replace it?, Geek.Com

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/silicon-shrinking-will-end-about-2020-what-will-replace-it-2008128/

Is DNA Surpassing Silicon? George Klington Fernandez, St. Eugene University, Zambia

http://www.scribd.com/doc/30065573/IS-DNA-SURPASSING-SILICON

Some (personal) Medical Insurance Facts

While the country is swirling with monumental discussion, facts, statistics, opinions, lies and myths about the medical care and medical insurance issues, I thought I would share some of my personal facts regarding my wife’s and my medical coverage; anecdotal though it may be.

Medical Insurance:

When we retired in 2006, our group (state public employee) medical insurance premium for our joint coverage began billing us $893.76 per month. Prior to retiring our employer paid for this coverage. Today our premium is $1,157.46 – a 29.5% increase in premium costs over 6 years. The current rate of inflation is 2%.

Last year our monthly health care premium actually went down from $1,159.52, to $1,157.45 this year – a $2.07 per-month decrease. However, the plan has changed whereby we now must pay $500 out-of-pocket before anything is covered. So essentially, our medical costs have actually increased 3.5% over last year.

This year, our insurance provider is requiring all customers to participate in a mandatory “Health Engagement Model (HEM) program”. A surcharge (penalty) of $17.50 per person will be added to our monthly premium if we do not comply with the HEM requirements, which consists of watching online training videos. Between my wife and me, we have spent six hours on this process. Emphasis for those of you who decry government interference regarding your health care, note that these are private company hoops we are having to jump through – not government.

Over these six years, our group coverage has forced us to change insurance companies four times. As a result, we have had to change from medical providers and facilities with whom we have established doctor-patient relationships over years. Emphasis again, for those of you who decry government making decisions about your health care, note that these are private companies, making choices for us who we will be allowed to see – not government.

Pharmaceuticals:

One prescription my wife takes cost $543.78 for a 3-month supply in 2007. This same prescription charges the insurance company $912.58 today. This is a 68% increase in the cost of this drug over five years. Our co-pay for this prescription was $15, it is now $75.

… researchers’ estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion. [1]

Dental insurance:

We discontinued dental insurance as the premium amount plus the out-of-pocket costs for non-covered expenses was more than simply paying for services directly.

Final thoughts:

Our medical insurance premium, deductibles and co-pays consume one-third of our disposable income. I often wonder how many Conservative local business owners would much rather I spend that $19,800 a year in their local restaurants and businesses than send this money to out-of-town insurance companies? Multiply my $19,800 by the thousands of people like me – this amounts to millions of dollars denied the local economy.

Consider that for every car you buy, every bag of groceries, every movie ticket, every magazine, every gallon of gasoline… the cost of employee medical care premiums is factored into the price of what we pay for those goods and services. Why wouldn’t Conservatives rather want to either A) reduce the cost of their goods by that factor and increase sales, or B) pocket the additional profit from the reduced overhead, by having their employee insurance costs picked up by a single payer government plan? A single-payer plan seems like a win-win for every business in the county except medical insurance companies. Our business leaders must be the laughing stock of the remainder of the developed industrial world.

My final thought on the ACA (aka: ObamaCare)

It appears to focus of this law is directed entirely on insurance coverage but little on containing the rise in medical costs and the demise of medical outcomes. But hey… it’s a start.

References:

1. Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than ResearchAnd Development, Study Finds, ScienceDaily.com, January 5, 2008.

 

What's Wrong with Americans?

What exactly is "Obamacare"?

I ran across this fairly concise yet thorough overview of what exactly the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (affectionately known as ObamaCare) at the web site Reddit.com

Rather than completely republish the article, I will merely link to it below. It is presented in simple information points. I encourage you to browse the key points; whoever did prepared this did an excellent job.

What exactly is Obamacare and what did it change?

The underlying opposition to the Affordable Care Act come primarily from those who claim they don't want government making medical decisions about their health care. But just under half our population is already currently receiving government managed health through Medicare and Medicaid with few complaints and at administrative costs far under that of private sector insurance companies which have a profit incentive to reduce costs. Employees of government medical insurance providers do not earn multi-million dollar bonuses and salaries.

It is an established fact that the USA has the highest medical costs with the lowest outcomes of any developed country. The facts speak for themselves. If you don't like the Affordable Care act, what is your alternative in a system where these costs increase far greater then inflation every year? Opponents, I'm listening.

Where The Hell ... ?

Okay, I've been slacking as of late. Frankly it's becoming difficult to regularly formulate a cogent essay on topics over which which I end up finding myself extremely depressed.

However I recently ran across this video; and not being the purist that many bloggers are in avoiding stooping to draw upon YouTube for content, I gladly offer this very uplifting clip to pass on. Matt has discovered the way the world is really supposed to work.

(Do yourself a favor... Run it Full Screen. Enjoy!)

The American People Have Spoken

As House Speaker John Boehner likes to remind us, The American People Have Spoken:

Source unknown.

American Coup d'état

In the plot of the film “Seven Days in May” authored by “Twilight Zone” creator, Rod Serling, the United States government faces an attempted Coup d'état; a takeover of our government by the military. Seem impossible? I suggest that this very thing is currently playing out in our country as we watch. However it is not the military who is orchestrating this coup – it is the power of money.

The Supreme Court poured gasoline on a smoldering fire of campaign finance reform in it’s “Citizens United” decision, affirming a decision made decades earlier that corporations be considered as having the same constitutional free speech rights as individuals. Money has become the voice for that speech.

In Wisconsin, the recall election of governor Scott Walker failed, in large part, due to the support of campaign spending amounting to seven times that of his opponents; this in spite of a monumental “get out the vote” initiative.[1]  In a nation where the population obtains the overwhelming balance of their political information from television advertising, where people vote their ‘gut’ over their head, the results are easy to predict.

Will this ever change; can it? It is doubtful. The powers of money and influence smell the blood in the water; they will use that same power to thwart any attempt to wrest their grip on control.

I personally fear that our 200-year old experiment in Democracy has come to an end – our economy, once the beacon of the free world, now revolves almost wholly upon using money to concentrate the acquisition of even more. Most of us stand powerless, like lowly surfs as modern day Genghis Khans sweep over our landscape pillaging and ravaging our Republic by those who equate freedom as no loftier a goal than to acquire personal financial gain.

I am Robert the Skeptic and I approve of this message.

References:

1.  "The Influence Industry: In Wisconsin recall, theside with most money won big", Washington Post, June 6, 2012

Perspective

Gay Marriage, Bain Capital, Entitlements, deficits, Westboro Baptist Church, children murdered execution style in Syria…

… but stop for a moment to look at the photograph below – It was taken by the Voyager I spacecraft, the first man-made object to leave our solar system, shortly before it turned it’s camera toward ‘home’ to snap one final photograph before continuing it's journey.

 “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” - Carl Sagan

The Plan

There seems to be little doubt that, throughout the world, and particularly in the US, there has been a monumental transference of wealth from the Middle Class to the very highest levels of the Upper Class. Substantiation of this trend is readily available from a wide variety of sources – it is reflected in tax rates, real estate and equities ownership, valuation of net worth, salaries and bonuses. It is happening – it is real. But is this the result of some sort of diabolical plan, a grand conspiracy?

A few years ago I heard a story on National Public Radio’s “ThisAmerican Life” (Act 2, ‘The Plan’) which told of gentrification of neighborhoods in Washington DC. Here predominantly Black neighborhoods were slowly being replaced by upwardly mobile middle class Whites. In one specific instance, an academically well performing school was condemned in order to make room for new housing – housing which was marketed to mostly higher income (White) people.

The synopsis of The Plan: “American cities have gone through a massive wave of gentrification in the last few decades. To some people, it's not a natural ebb and flow of the real estate market, but a plot, by rich, mainly white people, to take over the neighborhoods of poor, mainly black people.”

But it turns out there was/is no “Plan”, at least, not one that can be attributed to a designed conspiracy, that is. These sorts of changes are, of course, happening in neighborhoods all over the country. My own kids recently bought and renovated an old home in an inner city Portland, Oregon neighborhood. Now known as the Alberta Arts District, the neighborhood is frequently the subject of articles in Sunset Magazine featuring its eclectic boutiques and restaurants. To people of our kid’s generation, integration of neighborhoods such as this is a positive for society. But are these changes the results of specific planning or the result of other perhaps not so obvious forces?

In Europe “Austerity” looms threateningly over the customary way of life. In Greece, people experiencing shortages of food.for the first time in their lives. Here in this country the social safety net is being targeted as the source of both our moral and economic decay. Erstwhile CEOs pull in salaries and bonuses that would make the Vanderbilt’s, Carnegies and Rockefellers of their day looking like chumps.

We read that the Koch brothers have convened secret meetings including influential business and political leaders; even Supreme Court Justices. But do these individuals truly have the power to coordinate a conspiracy on such a monumental scale?

Many now grudgingly accept (I among them) that the boom times after WWII in this country was more of an economic aberration than an linearly upward trend into future decades. Is the flow of culture, for that matter, designed or driven through it’s own momentum? Consider the attitude changes over the past decade regarding Gay Marriage, for example. Was this progress cooked up in some elaborate plan or the result of some sort of cultural evolution?

I recall observing large flocks of hundreds of individual birds flying in undulating, random patterns; the whole of which appearing to have some direction. Scientists studying this behavior were curious if, among the individual birds, there might be a “leader” directing the movement of the flock.

Such movements are a prime example of emergent behavior: the behavior is not a property of any individual bird, but rather emerges as a property of the group itself. There is no leader, no overall control; instead the flock's movements are determined by the moment-by-moment decisions of individual birds, following simple rules in response to interactions with their neighbors in the flock. [1]

Rising consumer prices, falling standard of living, the rich becoming richer, may more be a product of individuals or groups taking advantage of opportunities and situations, than any sort of detailed conspiracy – Cultural Evolution through Emergent Behavior? Perhaps.

Source:

1. How does a flock of birds wheel and swoop in unison?, March 2004, TheStraightDope.com